Christine Blasey Ford says she still suffers from anxiety and PTSD-like symptoms 36 years after U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted her at a house party when they were both teens.

Kavanaugh denies the allegations, which are the subject of a one-week FBI investigation, but Ford’s assertion that an attempted rape in the early 1980s still physically affects her today appears to be echoed in research published this week about the lingering effects of sexual violence.

Two new studies suggest trauma leaves a lasting imprint on the mind and body that might transcend generations. One study found that women with a history of sexual harassment or assault have higher blood pressure, and a greater risk of depression and anxiety than women who didn’t suffer from such trauma. The other suggests that men who were abused as children may carry a “molecular scar” in their sperm cells.

In a study published Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine, assaulted women were almost three times more likely to develop symptoms of major depression and were more than two times more likely to suffer from elevated anxiety than women who said they were never assaulted.

Women who reported being sexually harassed at work were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure and higher triglycerides, or blood fats, increasing their risk of heart disease. Both sexual harassment and sexual assault were also linked with a two-fold higher likelihood of insomnia.

One theory is that sexual assault and harassment put the body in a fight-flight response, said co-author Karestan Koenen, a professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Harvard. For some, that physiological response persists, even when the threat goes away, “leading to a generalized state of hyper arousal, which is what we think might influence our risk for these other outcomes, like hypertension and disrupted sleep,” Koenen said.

The findings held even after researchers took socioeconomic status, medication use, medical history and other factors into account.

“It is widely understood that sexual harassment and assault can impact women’s lives and how they function, but this study also evaluates the implications of these experiences for women’s health,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Rebecca Thurston, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

“If you are a victim of assault or harassment, don’t suffer through it. Get help. If you can, change the situation or remove yourself from it.”

The research involved 304 women aged 40 to 60 who were originally recruited for a study looking at menopause and atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. In a paper last year, the team reported that women who had experienced three or more traumatic events over their lifetime — sexual harassment, the death of a child, being in a car accident, experiencing a natural disaster or being beaten or mugged — had less flexible blood vessels. The more trauma, the worse their “endothelial function,” meaning the ability of the arteries in the heart to dilate fully.

“We kept looking at other explanations. Is what we’re seeing due to education, race, ethnicity,” Thurston told the Chicago Tribune. “There was a very clear link to trauma.”

In the new study, 22 per cent of the women said they were pressured into having some type of unwanted sexual contact. Nineteen per cent said they had experienced sexual harassment at work that was either physical or verbal.

The study also found that women with a history of sexual harassment were more likely to be university educated.

“Why more highly educated women in the present study were more likely to be harassed is unclear,” the authors wrote. “These women may more often be employed in male-dominated settings, be more knowledgeable about what constitutes sexual harassment, or be perceived as threatening; sexual harassment is an assertion of hierarchical power relations.”

In the second study, scientists looked at how child abuse might affect the DNA in sperm cells, not by changing the genes themselves but by attaching little chemical “tags” that stick to some parts of a sperm cell’s DNA. This tagging is known as methylation.

Methylation works like a dimmer switch, making genes more or less active than usual, a change known as the epigenetic effect. Scientists are becoming increasingly convinced epigenetics is influenced by a person’s environment or life experiences — and that these changes can be passed through generations.

Researchers from Harvard University and the University of British Columbia tested 48 sperm samples from 34 adult men. Seventeen had reported “high” physical or emotional abuse as children. All had been shoved, grabbed, hit or physically attacked in some other way, and most had been threatened with violence. Two men had been sexually abused.

The researchers found striking differences in methylation between victims and non-victims of child abuse in 12 regions of the men’s genomes. Some of the genes are involved with neurodegenerative disorders, others in the body’s immune response.

Published in Translational Psychiatry, the study doesn’t answer what is physiologically happening in these men, or if the differences in methylation can affect their health. Also unknown is whether the DNA tagging can survive fertilization and be passed down to children.

When sperm meets the egg, “there is a massive amount of genetic reshuffling, and most of the methylation is at least temporarily erased,” lead author Andrea Roberts, a research scientist at the Harvard Chan School, said in a statement. “But finding a molecular signature in sperm brings us at least a step closer to determining whether child abuse might affect the health of the victim’s offspring.”

Research has shown early life trauma can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and psychiatric disorders — problems that “pop up decades after the incident occurs,” said co-author and UBC PhD candidate Nicole Gladish.